The Rise and Fall of Medium.com
There’s a subscribers-only newsletter, Study Hall, that noted, back in June 2018, the unsatisfying progress of Medium bold vision to save journalism, or lack thereof. The home page of websites typically garners the most web traffic and thus it’s the most important real estate to show what a website or platform is all about. Katie Fustich, the author of that Study Hall piece, declared these incisive words —
Going to the homepage of Medium.com means entering one of the most conflicted spaces in digital media. It’s a black hole of pseudo-emotional Thought Catalog runoff, corporate strategists spewing productivity hacks, personal lifestyle blogs, professional journalists blogging in their off-hours, and the odd slickly produced feature story. It wavers eternally between an open platform where anyone can post anything, in the mode of Twitter or Facebook, and an actual editorial operation commissioning ambitious original projects that are now paid for (in part) by readers. The problem is telling all the different kinds of content apart — and understanding how they fit together.
Struggling for Survival
Even with the injection of venture capital and other temporary funds to bolster the ambitious project, this experiment has only seen red numbers of deficit since its launch in 2012, unable to find an editorial nor financial model to make the cash flow in that elusive positive direction.
Plenty of blog stories, even here on Medium, you’d find articles that express the frustration of the Medium paywall, and several different ways to work around the paywall so one could continue reading more than a few stories a month without paying a cent.
Its current subscriber rate of $5 per month shouldn’t deter the regular customer who gets a latte at their neighborhood coffee shop or Starbucks, but for the casual readers of starred articles at Medium, it’s obviously not getting enough subscribers to make the numbers work.
To add insult to injury, Medium’s unpredictable changes to its approach to doing advertising and business and editorial, made it all the more unfriendly to publishers, writers, journalists, on the other side of that reader-writer consumer-producer equation.
How Much Should Content Cost?
Now let’s ask the question, how much should content cost? What’s a reasonable price? There’s varying prices for newspapers and magazines. And perhaps the most comparable thing to Medium stories are digital newspapers, because new stories are posted daily.
Magazines used to be only weekly or less frequent, but with digital publishing, there are some magazines that post new content daily or even more frequently. Both newspapers and magazines had a majority of its revenue from advertising, but that’s changed dramatically in the digital age.
Subscription Prices for Newspapers Online
The median weekly price of $2.31 is equivalent to $10 per month and $120 per year for a digital news subscription.
Do you know how many articles are published in a newspaper? Well, The Washington Post averages 1,200 daily items (stories, graphics, videos, including wire stories) and the New York Times averages 150 articles daily.
You’re smart. You can do the math. Does Medium provide enough value for paying customers?
I want to believe that the people running this Medium business have tried all kinds of modeling and projections to get its finances in order. But the X-factor is customer behavior. And not enough readers want to pay for what is currently on Medium to keep everyone around the table happy.
What Might Give Life to Medium? My Open Letter to Medium.
It’s possible to do a hybrid approach, we see it with cars like Toyota Prius and fruits like pluots.
A beautiful reading experience is great. A beautiful writing experience is great. But digital technology is always improving and getting better. What’s changed here on Medium? (not much, and i know it’d cost $$ to make it so.)
A couple thoughts I have, I’ll share, for their consideration —
- make custom domain mapping available as an add-on. People would pay for that. It used to be available.
- Serve the publications better; I think there’s more that Medium can do for publications to stand on their own and promote their own brands.
- Medium seems to have some connections to Penname, ManyStories, and SMedian. They should all be working under one coordinated cohesive eco-system. (The 3 latter ones are already inter-related.)
- Medium could promote the publications rather than featuring stories by topics only. For instance, have you seen what’s on the Starbucks Wifi welcome screen ? Quite a number of valuable publications—
Well, that’s all I can think of at this sitting. Anything you have to add?
